


in the hollow behind eyelids

by Candentia



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Beholding Kink (The Magnus Archives), Dom/sub Undertones, M/M, Masturbation, Phone Sex, Praise Kink, Season/Series 03, Unresolved Tension, Voice Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:02:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29506608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Candentia/pseuds/Candentia
Summary: Jon can't sleep. Elias is nice enough to help.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 25
Kudos: 110





	in the hollow behind eyelids

**Author's Note:**

> Beta read by [@MeanderingWits.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeanderingWits) Originally posted on 09/20. Now with spiffier editing. 
> 
> Prompts were insomnia + phone sex + fantasy. Set in s3.

It's 4 AM in Boston when the phone rings, a shrill banshee's wail that could jolt awake the dead. Fortunately, Jon is not among their ranks. Nor is he asleep, though it’s not for lack of trying. On the nightstand lies a crumpled diary page detailing his traveling schedule for the next week. Written in the margins is a scathing suggestion to himself to get some rest.

It turns out he’s a bit of a prick when abroad and exhausted.

Most people would be startled. Jon isn’t. He isn’t even surprised. He rolls over, yanking the receiver off the hook. It gets cradled against his ear as he flops his head onto the pillow. It’s lumpy but that doesn’t matter—it could be stuffed with goose down and he’d still be staring at the ceiling with gritty eyes come sunrise.

“Elias.” The name is exhaled as prayer wedded to a curse. “What do you want?”

“Oh, Jon. Neither you nor I have enough time to cover that particular list.”

Homesickness cuts deep. Elias’s voice is comforting, for all that he’s taken residence as the devil on Jon’s shoulder. It evokes a longing to be in the institute, breathing in the familiar mustiness of the archives. Where he belongs. God help him but Jon’s _tired_ of chasing Gertrude’s ghost. Of listening to American accents, cringing with every cab ride because his brain panics that they’re on the wrong side of the road, this is how it ends, not with the undoing of the world but with the screech of tires. 

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Why are you calling me?”

“You need release.”

No. Something hauntingly recognizable twists low in his groin. Jon pinches harder. “...I can’t possibly imagine what you mean.”

“No? How dull your imagination has become,” Elias tuts. Then: “Strip.”

The tracksuit bottoms are halfway to Jon’s knees before his brain catches up. 

Jon freezes, thumbs hooked on the elastic waistband. What is he doing? There’s no good reason for him to submit. It’s not sane. His emotions are too volatile. Too unexplored when it comes to Elias. (Well, the ones that aren’t anger and betrayal; he’s saturated himself in _those_ until his blood curdled.) Their relationship had been complicated enough before it went to hell. Now? Jon is low-key panicking, torn between his common sense and that part of him that has been carefully tucked away.

“I really don’t think this is appropriate,” he manages. The digital clock on the nightstand paints his eyelids in red neon.

“I disagree. Strip, Jon. Now. Or hang up.”

Wanker. Tosser. _Bloody manipulative bastard._ With that, Elias reminded Jon that it’s as easy as slamming the handset on the hook to end this. The Atlantic Ocean separates them, yawning and vast. Elias won’t press the issue, won’t call back. With the implicit threat that he never will again—not for this.

Jon despises how well he understands the man. More so now that Elias has revealed his true colors, but that razor edge was always there. Worse, it had been part of the appeal.

Sighing, Jon kicks at the sheets, letting them pool on the floor. He turns onto his back, removing his joggers. 

“Top too, if you please.”

“How do you—” Jon inhales. The question isn’t worth completing. He places the receiver on the nightstand with a deliberate click that Elias can hear on the other side of the world.

A minute later, he’s starkers on the bed, goosebumps rippling across his skin. The air circulating the motel room is nippy and Jon is conscious of parts of his anatomy that generally don’t register. Even the phone is cool when he pins it to his shoulder.

“Right. What now?” He strives for indifference. As if they’ve made a habit of this and that it borders on tedious for Jon. Elias might not be fully human, but he’s thousands of miles away. The intolerable simmer in Jon’s guts can remain his secret.

“Good boy,” Elias praises softly, and that stokes the heat into an incandescent glow, almost visible through his skin. Jon shivers, hand drifting to his abdomen protectively.

“Right. _And?”_

Elias is audibly smiling. “I’m thinking, Jon. Considering my options. What would be the best way to get you to fall asleep?”

“Keep spouting drivel and you’ll have your answer.”

A sigh. Fond, but disappointed. Jon’s nails dig into his stomach, snared in uneasy anticipation. “What a pity that I’m not there to punish you properly. But let’s attribute that to your tiredness, shall we? I’m in a benevolent mood. Move down on the bed until your head is free of the pillow.”

Jon arches an eyebrow but does so, refusing to admit that part of him thinks it’s also a pity.

“Spread your legs.”

“Pardon?” 

“I don’t believe I was unclear.” That silky tone annoys and excites Jon in equal measure. But before Jon can mouth off, Elias continues. “The bedframe has finials, if you care to notice. You’re going to brace your feet against them.”

Well, that confirms without a shadow of a doubt that Elias’s abilities are unhindered by a continental divide. That doesn’t make an incredibly imprudent pulse of lust curl through Jon, not at all.

Jon sits up onto his elbows, measuring the distance. It’s a single, meaning the bed is narrow but… His face flames. One leg extends, settling his arch against one of the finials topping the bedposts. Then he repeats the same with the other leg.

It leaves him in a position that Jon frankly finds pornographic. His hips are tilted slightly upwards to accommodate the stretch, pressure on his shoulders because there’s nothing supporting his head. Jon scrubs at his cheeks, aware that they’ve lit up like embers. “I suppose you intend to deny me a pillow, too.”

“Perhaps. Although I’m not there to stop you, am I?” Elias asks with ill-suited innocence. Jon envisions Elias sitting in his office, sorting through paperwork idly while on the phone, pupils hazy with his focus elsewhere. On Jon. On the curve and dive of his hip bones, tracing his flanks and then dipping between his thighs. It’s a possessive, tangible sensation, and Jon’s muscles flex with the instinct to close his legs.

But he doesn’t.

Jon clears his throat. “I have to earn my pillow back, is that it?”

There’s a pause, and then rich laughter flows into Jon’s ear. “You can be so _lovely_ when you want to be. Yes, Jon. That’s exactly it. Be a good boy for me and you’ll earn your pillow back.” 

“You’re teasing me.” Elias can be aggravatingly funny with his droll wit, and Jon’s lips want to curve even now when he’s angry and humiliated and thrilled. His body is growing physically interested in the proceedings, heightening his unease. Being in possession of a low sex drive (nonexistent, if he’s being honest), Jon had considered masturbation as a sleeping aid days ago, yet brushed it off. By himself it was often a struggle to gather up the enthusiasm to get _into_ it, so to speak.

Not worth the effort, Jon had decreed. Perhaps he’d been hasty.

“Wet your fingers. Two should be enough.” Papers are shuffled and the vision of Elias in his office blooms vividly in the hollow behind Jon’s eyelids. The details are so sharp that he can count the striations in Elias’s pupils. 

It’s the saltiness of his digits registers first, long before he’s cognizant of having made the decision to obey.

Jon’s lips wrap around his fingers as if they weren’t his own. As if they were longer, the nails neater. He tips his head back because that’s expected from him, letting the fingertips reach far enough that the hard palate gives way to softness. It’s strangely dizzying, as if he’s registering multiple sets of superimposed sensations. Elias’s presence is so palpable that Jon is having trouble recalling that he’s alone.

Elias murmurs encouragement. That molten sweetness in Jon’s gut pools lower, centering in his groin, and the walls could have blinked open a thousand staring eyes and Jon wouldn’t have felt a difference. He’s as exposed as any person can ever be.

“Stop.”

Jon goes still. Begrudgingly. 

“I think,” Elias muses, as if discussing the archive’s yearly budget, “that we should start with your nipples first. The cold has done a number on them, hm?”

It has, and now that Elias has drawn his attention to them, they tighten into dull points. Jon knows from experience that those bits of flesh that he’d dismissed before (before _Elias)_ are a tricky spot for him. As in, they do nothing for him on his own.

“Ah, but you’re _not_ on your own, are you?” Elias snags that thought as decisively as if he were there, which would be deeply worrying if Jon had brain cells to spare. But as that heavy gaze drags its way up from Jon’s thighs to his chest, he sadly doesn’t. “Start with the left.”

“Demanding git,” Jon complains, and touches himself. He circles the ruched areola with a wet fingertip, leaving traces of saliva behind that sharpens the bite of the cold air. His tongue peeks in a quick swipe of his lower lip, wanting more.

“It’s one of my better qualities.” 

Jon has to laugh, though it’s a half-choked, abortive noise interrupted by Elias. “Too gentle. You don’t like it that way. Rougher, Jon.”

 _Maybe I do like it gentle,_ Jon thinks but that’s a lie—at least mostly it’s a lie—and his teeth sink into his lower lip at the same time as he twists his nipple between his thumb and forefinger hard enough to sting. He’s disappointed. It’s not enough. It’s not that clean brightness, that shock of having it be done _to_ him. 

It’s not _nothing,_ though. He gives an experimental tug, and Elias comments, “We should get you a piercing.”

Jon’s breath stumbles. “There’s far too much ‘we’ in that suggestion. But also, _no.”_

But he’s imagining it. Would the pain of it be that saltpeter flare, good in all the worst ways? What would it be like to have metal in his body? For Elias to roll his tongue over it and pull with his teeth—

“Yes,” comes from the phone, throaty and satisfied. Jon turns his head, pressing the handset closer, stopping shy of kissing the receiver. It’s plastic. Just plastic. 

He’s suddenly angry and tired. “Elias—”

“You’ll be home soon. Where you belong.”

Jon doesn’t voice the follow-up question that surges on a tide of dreadful, cobbled feelings. That elephant can remain unacknowledged forever. Or until Jon is ready to deal with it.

Which might mean the same thing either way.

“Can—”

“Touch the other one. Properly. Make it pretty for me.” 

A tether forms between Jon and his hand. A disconnect. Tactile feedback has to travel a long way to reach his muddled brain, and by then Elias has instructed him to something else, compounding the dissociative effect. Within minutes, Jon barely recognizes the fingers that skillfully ply and pluck at his sensitive flesh and then sink into the wetness of his mouth as his. They belong to Elias now, guided as surely as a marionette by its strings.

Jon doesn’t fight it. It’s comforting. He’s lost the plot, and the guilt that he’s allowing this will be _tremendous_ afterward, but right now? He craves being touched. If this is how he can have that, then so be it.

His cock is aching when Elias finally tells him to go for it. Palm and fingers slick with saliva, Jon wraps his entire hand around the base, gripping tight. Hesitation has burnt to ash. Puffs of air drop from Jon’s parted lips. They provide a counterpoint to Elias’s silence.

“E-Elias?” Jon checks that the call didn’t drop. 

“I’m watching you,” Elias admits and Jon’s hips piston into his own hand. Blood roars in his ears before it ebbs. 

He swallows. He shouldn’t ask. He. Should. Not. Ask. But Jon is no more able to resist than a cat lured with a toy. “What do you see?”

Another quiet interlude. The Elias in his head isn’t a video playing out, every second captured flawlessly. It’s a series of photographs snapped seconds apart, portraying disjointed action. Elias goes from writing on a piece of paper to resting back against his office chair—Jon hears the leather creaking through the line—and palms at the erection tenting his trousers.

“Your need.”

Jon’s thighs attempt to close again, a surge of mortification, of embarrassment, reddening his neck. His palm doesn’t stop rubbing his cock.

Elias’s smooth voice has dropped a register, not quite gravelly but—affected. Elias is _affected._ “I see your desire, Jon. Your loneliness, your fear. That beautiful blush covering your skin. I see your scars. You know what I’d do if I were there.”

“Y-yes. I suspect I do.” The embarrassment grows, skirting the invisible divide that tips over into yearning, into Jon stretching his limbs, the finials digging into his soles. He’s not self-conscious of how he’s been marked. Much. Jon isn’t going to waste energy mourning for some perceived lost beauty that he _definitely_ never had. Vanity’s not his style. 

But the worship Elias showers on every ugly, jagged bit of puckered flesh? That’s different. It makes and rebreaks Jon all at once. Why the _hell_ does he miss it?

“I’d start with the worm scars.” 

Jon nods jerkily. He’s chasing pleasure and being chased by it, teetering at the edge. A thin veneer of sweat covers his chest and he’s overheating, clenching and wanting more but this is all he has. He shakily lifts his free hand to the circular scars, following their path to his face. The way Elias would do it. Except Elias would then retrace them with teeth and lips, mapping the jagged edges with his tongue until Jon’s nerves sang.

“Yes, exactly. I do wish I were there with you. You’re doing wonderful but, hm, it’s not quite what you need, is it.” 

Jon scowls.

“Stop that—this is enough. I don’t—” _need you,_ is how that was supposed to end but it catches in his throat like a burr, painfully thorny. 

“Your hand stopped moving.”

Jon hastily squeezes himself, rubbing his palm over the weeping head, electricity buzzing up his spine. He’s positively breathless when he snaps, “You’re distracting me.”

“My apologies. Shall I continue? Or shall I consider this a job well begun and excuse myself while you finish it?”

“No.” Jon focuses on the vision. On the sequential snapshots. Their edges are dissolving into Gaussian blurs but the subject remains clear, stark in contrast.

Elias is reclining in his chair, arms lax while he speaks into a discreet Bluetooth. Agitation is suggested by his rigid jaw. A sign Jon recognizes, having learned how to read how close Elias was to coming from that alone.

“Why—why aren’t you touching yourself?” Jon asks. Not daring to suggest they come together, he’s unsteadily on the brink, and it would be—too intimate.

“Because this is about what you need. You need sleep. This is my way of taking care of you.”

“Y-your Archivist.”

Elias hums in approval. “Yes. Mine.” 

Jon bites his tongue, but enough of the moan filters out that there’s a damning silence followed by a chuckle. It activates pleasure centers in Jon’s brain that he wasn’t even aware existed and he squirms, muscles drawn into a delicious tension that hurts, that’s lambent and cold and burning all at once. Addictive and awful. 

“Do you have anything to add on the subject of being mine, Jon?” Elias is teasing him again, and Jon wants to snarl at him and kiss him. 

“S-sod off,” he bites out, hand twisting without rhythm over his swollen cock. There’s an instant when the world flips on its head (and is it the Stranger’s ritual, is everything being unmade and remade—?) and Jon is shaking, past stringing coherent thoughts about how _annoying_ Elias is and how audible his pleased smile is and how insulting it is to be claimed like property, like he belongs to the bastard—

The low-pitched whining filling the room is pouring out from his throat, Jon realizes, and his palm is slick with cum, smearing it messily around the head of his oversensitive cock, driving jolts of sputter-bright fireworks across overdrawn nerves. A husky murmur, soothing and balmy, is coming from the phone.

 _Fuck me,_ the words drift across Jon’s mind, faint and shivery.

“Soon, I hope. Get some rest, Jon. You’ve earned it.” 

There’s a click, and the feel of being the focus of attention ebbs, leaving Jon panting on the mattress, his thighs a sticky mess. He groans and rises to his feet—they cramp, having been shoved against the finials for what turned out to be a good half hour—and he cleans himself up with a wet towel in the bathroom before he drops straight into bed, not bothering to collect the sheets from the floor. Or to throw something on. It doesn’t matter. 

For the first time in months, Jon is asleep the moment his head touches the pillow. From within, the Eye sits in the sky and gazes at him unblinkingly. But for once, it too is satisfied.


End file.
